Related papers: Learning Mixtures of Plackett-Luce Models from Str…
The aggregation of k-ary preferences is a historical and important problem, since it has many real-world applications, such as peer grading, presidential elections and restaurant ranking. Meanwhile, variants of Plackett-Luce model has been…
When tracking user-specific online activities, each user's preference is revealed in the form of choices and comparisons. For example, a user's purchase history is a record of her choices, i.e. which item was chosen among a subset of…
Generalised linear models for multi-class classification problems are one of the fundamental building blocks of modern machine learning tasks. In this manuscript, we characterise the learning of a mixture of $K$ Gaussians with generic means…
We propose a novel parameterized family of Mixed Membership Mallows Models (M4) to account for variability in pairwise comparisons generated by a heterogeneous population of noisy and inconsistent users. M4 models individual preferences as…
Ordered probit and logit models have been frequently used to estimate the mean ranking of happiness outcomes (and other ordinal data) across groups. However, it has been recently highlighted that such ranking may not be identified in most…
We study the problem of learning a mixture model of non-parametric product distributions. The problem of learning a mixture model is that of finding the component distributions along with the mixing weights using observed samples generated…
The performance of finetuned large language models (LLMs) hinges critically on the composition of the training mixture. However, selecting an optimal blend of task datasets remains a largely manual, heuristic driven process, with…
We consider the problem of learning the true ordering of a set of alternatives from largely incomplete and noisy rankings. We introduce a natural generalization of both the classical Mallows model of ranking distributions and the…
We propose a novel and flexible rank-breaking-then-composite-marginal-likelihood (RBCML) framework for learning random utility models (RUMs), which include the Plackett-Luce model. We characterize conditions for the objective function of…
In this paper, we study the problem of learning one-dimensional Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) with a specific focus on estimating both the model order and the mixing distribution from independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.)…
We investigate the use of in-context learning and prompt engineering to estimate the contributions of training data in the outputs of instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs). We propose two novel approaches: (1) a similarity-based…
Modern key-value stores rely heavily on Log-Structured Merge (LSM) trees for write optimization, but this design introduces significant read amplification. Auxiliary structures like Bloom filters help, but impose memory costs that scale…
When using LLMs to rank items based on given criteria, or evaluate answers, the order of candidate items can influence the model's final decision. This sensitivity to item positioning in a LLM's prompt is known as position bias. Prior…
Preference learning is a widely adopted post-training technique that aligns large language models (LLMs) to human preferences and improves specific downstream task capabilities. In this work we systematically investigate how specific…
We study learning of human preferences from a limited comparison feedback. This task is ubiquitous in machine learning. Its applications such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, have been transformational. We formulate this…
Optimization of machine learning models is commonly performed through stochastic gradient updates on randomly ordered training examples. This practice means that sub-epochs comprise of independent random samples of the training data that…
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) utilize multimodal contexts consisting of text, images, or videos to solve various multimodal tasks. However, we find that changing the order of multimodal input can cause the model's performance to…
Modeling unknown systems from data is a precursor of system optimization and sequential decision making. In this paper, we focus on learning a Markov model from a single trajectory of states. Suppose that the transition model has a small…
Mixture of experts method is a neural network based ensemble learning that has great ability to improve the overall classification accuracy. This method is based on the divide and conquer principle, in which the problem space is divided…
This paper explores the adaptive (active) PAC (probably approximately correct) top-$k$ ranking (i.e., top-$k$ item selection) and total ranking problems from $l$-wise ($l\geq 2$) comparisons under the multinomial logit (MNL) model. By…